Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day — the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.
“Traditional” economic measurements and the dominant paradigm no longer work in a world of peak debt, peak energy and peak disasters. Can a new way of talking shift things? My interview with Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute on his latest book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. He’s diagnosed the problem. Now, how to communicate the issue to everyday folks and policy makers? Heinberg weighs in.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Restarting Libyan production
Todays prices and costs provide a very bad basis for making investment decisions because they reflect temporary relative market scarcities rather than long-run underlying physical ones. The world needs to abandon money as its measure for determining energy and economic policy if it is to invest its scarcest, most limiting resources in the best possible way.
Bill McKibben sure is making a big deal over a commodity piece of oil infrastructure. He and more than 200 climate activists think it’s worth getting arrested to stop TransCanada from building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, tar sands are uber-dirty. But with such a low energy return, won’t high costs just make them go away on their own? That’s what I always assumed. But now I’m starting to think this thing could be bad. Really bad.
How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels? What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future? What might we do if we can’t replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be? I finally got around to re-doing these calculations, and wanted to go through the numbers.
Taken as a whole, we believe that our oil metrics do a good job of assessing the totality of oil-related supply and demand risks. We do not expect the Index to be the last word on the topic, and we’re always willing to entertain new data that fit our criteria. The Index was created to provide a framework and a tool for analysts and policymakers. How would peak oil affect U.S. energy security? What would lowered export capacity mean? We hope that we have provided a means to help answer these types of questions.
Mr. Eule concludes his response by asking two very important questions: “How would peak oil affect U.S. energy security? What would lower export capacity mean?” Both issues are vital to our collective future yet they remain largely ignored by our elected officials, government agencies and mainstream media. It is hoped that both the Chamber and the EIA will address these questions in a direct and thorough manner in subsequent publications.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, a lawyer now turned petroleum geologist, announced to a South Carolina crowd recently, “Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. The day that President Obama became president,” she said, “gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look what it is today.”
At the intersection of global energy depletion and concerns about human impact on the environment lie some serious and oft overlooked issues. Largely gone from our public discourse is the idea that oil is infinite. It is now accepted, even to previous staunch cornucopians, that increasing, or even maintaining oil production will come only at higher costs. The new response to the energy/environmental crisis is to transition to a green economy, replacing our declining stocks of fossil sunlight with new technologies able to harness our current sunlight in its various forms. That these renewable technologies are available, viable and becoming more popular is not in question – however, whether these low carbon strategies can combine with now more expensive fossil fuels to maintain a growth trajectory for both the developed and developing worlds is another question entirely.
Nearly everyone would agree that we live in uncertain, challenging times. It seems that so much is happening so fast that it’s almost impossible to make sense of it all. We’re clearly on some kind of trajectory, but a trajectory toward what?
-After Tripoli, what is a petro-ruler to do? And what is China to do?
-Libya Must Shape its Own Future
-After Uprising, Rebels Face a Struggle for Unity
Transition Voice’s review of Richard Heinberg’s latest book, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality.
